I hope my kids won't be gay

a defense of "heteronormativity"

I hope my kids won't be gay. I'm writing this with the realization that it could come across as a radical and even bigoted thing to say in this day and age, and yes, worrying about how it will sound to my gay friends, whom I do not intend to insult.

I'm at the airport in a loooong line waiting for customer service. There are three or four reps at the counter, and they're working their little hearts out, but this mass of people is inching forward ever so slowly. I watch the people around me, absently noticing small details. A pair of young couples, eight sandalled feet; both men have their toes out, both women wearing cosy socks. An older woman in a striped shirt creates a big space between herself and the people in front of her. She makes eye contact and smiles at me. Is she flying alone like I am? I wonder.

Then I hear laughter and see two teens huddled together in line behind their parents, sharing a joke. The older one, maybe 16-17, with Kurt Cobain hair and a stubbly chin, is obviously a boy becoming a young man. The other, younger (14ish) is also boyish in dress with very short hair and oversized sweatshirt. But something snags my glance, which would've otherwise flitted on by. She's a girl. There are tells in her features and her affect, but I know it before I know why I know it. I ponder the keenness of human discernment that allows for this observation. And I don't think this girl is a tomboy; I bet she's "nonbinary" or even "trans."

As if for further confirmation, her mom and dad are both sporting prominent "pride" symbols on their luggage. Giant gaudy rainbows glare out at the world defensively, protectively, proudly. I begin to make up a story in my head about this family.

In my story they are boldly progressive, fierce advocates for gay rights who have raised their kids on "love is love," telling them it's just as good to marry a person of the same sex as the opposite, heaping special praise and attention on gay friends, buying gay pride T-shirts, putting out “In This House...” yard signs. Minus the yard signs, this was pretty much how I raised my daughters, so I draw on personal history to craft this hypothetical family bio. I then imagine that when the daughter here started showing interest in gender, the parents (mom in particular) were pretty pleased. What better to cement your ally-cred than accepting your lgbtqia+2s child and advocating for her them? Fast forward to now and here they stand, rainbows forward, trans ambassador/mascot in tow...

Of course, it's easy to make up stories about people, and those stories are usually either completely incorrect or at least dreadfully reductive. This family is certainly far more complex, and each of them so much deeper and more interesting than the ideological stereotypes my cursory judgement wants to project. But in the 30 seconds it has taken me to spot the hidden girl and the sexuality symbols for "gay pride" and jump to these hasty conclusions I've realized something else: I hope my kids won't be gay.

And that's a fairly significant thing for me to realize and acknowledge. It used to be common for families to be distressed by a child's "coming out" as gay- hence the need to be "in" in the first place. I don't feel like this, at least not for the reasons I think people used to. I don't feel disapproval or disgust about homosexuality. I grew up with gay friends and family members. There are gay and lesbian people among my favorite living humans. I don't have a "-phobia," but I do hope my children will experience a life with marriage and children of their own- that's hard to do when you're gay, and I refuse to discount its value. If my kids do end up being gay I'll embrace them and love them just the same, hope they'd have happy lifelong loves, and welcome their spouses into my family. So what makes this realization surprising is that 1) I mean it- I really do not want my kids to be gay, and 2) I used to not mind the idea and probably would've even been proud about it.

So I've changed my mind. Am I more conservative? I don't know, perhaps a little. But maybe it's more about the principle: I supported gay rights because I felt like I was standing up for individual rights against a tyrannical domineering collective, and now that collective has changed its colors. To rainbow colors. Just as lgbtqia+ keeps gobbling up more letters, the collective it purports to represent is taking over more and more of our culture, especially our youth culture.

Another part of the problem is that the gay that's being promoted today isn't just gay anymore. It used to be that "coming out" meant asserting a personal truth strong enough to overcome one's fear of going against the social grain. Some people ARE just gay, so social acceptance makes sense. But if it's not "gay" or "lesbian," but an lgbtqia++ role-playing game every kid is invited to try early and often, replete with special flags, colors, rules, and label, isn't that a different thing entirely? It's gay™️: a fantasy-scape virtual reality where you can invent new ways to define youself and your social world will ripple outward to encompass and applaud each new avatar. Because if I support your delusion you'll support mine. It's a way to create, for a generation of play-deprived, screen-raised kids to PLAY with each other. To conspire. To control. To deny the limits of nature and their own bodies. To do everything but accept themselves as they are and direct their focus away from what to BE and into what they can DO in the world. To do everything except grow up.

And on an even more philosophical level, I wonder… if culture tells us it’s not only okay, but good to be gay, might more and more people choose it? Not just gay™️, but old-school gay, too, because its so much easier to be a woman among women, a man among men; free from the mystery and misery of learning to deal with the yearnings and limitations of the opposite sex. I’ve certainly declared, from the depths of post-breakup hell, that I’d like to become a lesbian because relationships with men are hopeless. And what if a preponderance of us make that choice- what are the implications for procreation? A drop in birthrate, sure. And increased demand for children engineered artificially outside of heterosexual relationships, without mother and father and at massive cost to women’s bodies (surrogacy, IVF, etc), not to mention technological monstrosities like CRISPR and artificial wombs. Is this the world we want to create? Isn't it possible to accept gay people without attacking “heteronormativity,” which describes a world in which most people choose opposite sex partners and create traditional families? We’ve learned not to shame gay people for loving who they love, but should we PROMOTE homosexuality to our kids? Because that’s what we are doing.

And it's everywhere.

Gay, and Gay™️, are advertized to our kids like McDonald's, GI Joe, Barbie, and MTv were advertized to Gen X children- but now even the teachers, doctors, counselors, and even public schools are in on it. Imagine if we'd had posters for those companies up on the walls for our classrooms! And teachers inserting Barbie dolls and Ronald McDonald inclusivity lessons into all kinds of subjects... it's absurd, of course, but what about the absurdity of sexuality education for very young children, or explicit instructions for gay sex, not just the basics of reproductive biology, being provided to our adolescents by public school educators? And the sexuality flags that are featured more prominently than our state or national flags. This is still advertizing, make no mistake: but it's not advertizing by companies to sell products, it's advertizing by the establishment to sell a lifestyle. Aka "social engineering."

And if this social engineering is making our girls too disgusted with girlhood to be girly, too wary of and repulsed by boys to be straight, and hopelessly in love with a gentle, romantic myth of masculinity that can only be found in effete anime heros and other young girls pretending to be boys- will they want to find husbands, become wives? Mothers? If it's making our boys ashamed of the animalistic nature of their sex drives, convinced that attraction to women is brutish and disrespectful, and hooked on endless streams of porn as an outlet as soon as they start getting erections- will they become so obsessed with seeking and sneaking pleasure for themselves that being a husband and father who sacrifices stoically for his family becomes laughably unthinkable? How much is all this advertising changing the way kids think about themselves?

I don't know the stats on homosexual and transgender identification in young people off hand, but I do know both are growing rapidly. People like me campaigned to remove the stigma from gayness and today's youth are growing up within the momentum we created. Their parents are still running, like Wile-E-Coyote, legs a'spinnin', not yet aware they've run right over the cliff edge. We've worked so hard to make gay cool, normal, and desirable, that we've steered our children, like lemmings, right toward that same cliff- and this one is a cliff of avoidance, short-term pleasure-seeking, narcissism, and anti-fertility. And rejection of both real masculinity and real femininity in favor of a stereotyped, snap chat-filtered, pornified, anime-driven false reflection, staring back at them from a screen.

So yeah, I said it. I don't want my kids to be gay- especially not the new gay™️. I don't want them to live behind a fragile carapace of identity held together by vanity and shared delusion. I want them to grow up to be strong men who love strong women and strong women who love strong men, with all the wonder, grit, disappointment, limitation, and expansion that entails. I want them to be married and have babies. To really work at loving someone, to really be loved, and to see both their own and their spouse's features smiling back at them in the eyes of the children they've created together. I want them to live a full life. To move through every developmental stage, and not get stuck in a Peter Pan phase of sexual childishness and selfishness where consent is the only limit, or in a life where sex is a solo project with visual aids, never integrated into a loving relationship, where parenthood is not on the table.

I want to steer my children away from the cliff. Individuality is fine and good. But this new gay™️... this establishment promoted anti-fertility lifestyle... no. I don't want my kids to have anything to do with that.

I look back at the hiding girl in the airport line. She's smiling at her brother. There's something delicate in her posture that is a poignant and charming reminder that even ordinary looking young women possess a magical quality that has inspired men to create so much great romantic art and literature. I hope someday she finds a boyfriend who sees the magic in her, loves her for it, and frees her from the avatar she's trying to wear.